I love linux. I love gentoo. But when I was sampling other distros (I love choice) I tried archlinux. This isn't momentous as it stands, but when I went into the forums to help get it running I found what seemed like A LOT of people trash talking gentoo and saying how much better they were. Was there a war between some devels I didn't know about.
They also keep saying how much faster their system is with arch vs. gentoo. Its speed was comparable, but when I installed kde, it only installed kde-base and kde-libs. Thats it. Would that affect the speed a lot not having any extras?
In short I really thought arch had potential. It has a good dependency checking, and you can build packages easily if tediously. Kind of slack meets debian.
I just wanted to see if I was the only one, if what they said is true or a matter of their package selection and dependency checking (hence they are running fewer apps), and if there was some kind of squabble I missed somewhere.

mrjohnston_________________I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my granfather did, unlike all the passengers in his car.

Last edited by mrjohnston on Mon Jul 28, 2003 10:28 pm; edited 2 times in total

I don't know anything about Arch Linux (this post is the first I heard of it). But, I do remember when I started at these forums (way back in January ), there was an awful lot of talk about how much better gentoo was than debian. Seemed almost every thread turned into a gentoo vs debian flamewar. Now, I see a lot less of that. This is probably the same thing. Maybe it's just a natural result of a distro gaining in popularity. People feel like they have to talk about why they like it more than whatever else they could be using instead. It'll probably die down over time, just like the gentoo vs debian stuff has.

I have seen anti-gentoo sentiments popping up in various places. Here is a quote from some ASS on slashdot from a few days ago:

Anonymous Coward wrote:

Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot translator-o-matic

Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes and leprotards who absolutely
MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity. Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really means...

"Gentoo makes me so much more productive."
"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and
potentially unstable optimisation settings."

"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"
"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC
output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom."

"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."
"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t
though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."

"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo."
"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and
glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and .debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages),
my box MUST be faster. It's nothing to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."

"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..."
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH .rpms together on the command line, and that problems hardly ever occur if one
uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't designed for)."

"All the other distros are soooo out of date."
"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat
perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -O9 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."

"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."
"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far too much of a company's
valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"

These bastards just dont get it!!! You don't even have to use portage or compile *all* of your software! Everything that is big has a binary package and you can start from stage3.

Yeah! I saw that slashdot posting too. Pissed me right off as well. Its like the Limp Bisquit thing where everyone really loves it then starts turning on them.
My biggest peeve is it is ALWAYS for the completely wrong reasons. I would like gentoo to add menu links by default and a couple other things, but its always that it is too young, or unstable or takes too long to compile between breaking.
My system never breaks, and generally can download and compile most packages faster than I could surf for an rpm or tgz. Why trash the stuff thats a step forward, and now with the OSX stuff we are being revolutionary instead of evolutionary and thats just cool.
I hope this anti-gentoo crap cools down so I can too!

mrjohnston_________________I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my granfather did, unlike all the passengers in his car.

Welcome to the trials of success, folks. Over the last few months, Gentoo has gained a lot of prominence and is easily the top 'source' distro and is even giving slackware and debian a run for their money as the top 'geek' distro.

When we were the new kid on the block, we trash-talked the 'successful' distros (Red Hat is near-universally the whipping boy in other forums). Now that we are one of the 'successful' distros, time for the new kids to trash us.

I think that taking the moral high road of offering choice, advice, and help rather than trash is our best response.

I tend to stay out of distro vs distro flamewars, I use gentoo cause it is a fun thing to play with, even though I have it set to get unmasked packages, it never crashes. I have tried all the distros, htey all have htier strong points and gentoo just happens to be the one I am using now.

Personally I think that peopel who advocate that one distro, or one operating system is right for everybody are crack pots. There is no way I woudl reccomend gentoo to my friend who is just learning linux. I told him to check out Manrake. My science teacher should stay the hell away from Linux alltogether, my reccomendation was windows XP for him. A more advanced linux distro is right for me, cause I like to get my hands dirty and play with stuff.

All operating systems have thier strong points, and although I do favour linux, specifically gentoo, to use personally, I admit that Linux, or gentoo is in no way, shape or form, right for everybody

OK, before we all go off down the road, I did a quick check on the archlinux forums with the keyword Gentoo. There were quite a few hits, but most were only information comments. I found a few disagreablw threads, but they were mostly along the lines of "I don't like Gentoo, because I don't feel like spending hours compiling". Like it or not, that is a valid comment.

In fact, I think there are far more threads slagging Gentoo in these forums, than in those of ArchLinux.

Let's keep things in perspective. There are, believe it or not, rational people who don't like Gentoo for good reasons.

I saw the same post on slashdot a few days ago as well, and i nearly fell off my chair laughing. I like gentoo for things that appeal to me, those things might not be as important to some others, who will look for other things.
It's a biut cryptic, but it boils down to simple truth; you choose what's right for YOU. The whole distro war stuff is rediculous, but at least there are different distro's and different systems to choose from. In the end it's all Linux right?_________________You are unique ... just like everyone else.

A faster broadband connection is only helpful for binary packages. Gentoo takes 99% of its time compiling Gnome. Gentoo is just a system for stupid people with too much time on their hands. The only achievement of that distribution is that it makes installing Linux a difficult, time-consuming, and error-prone process that gives you bragging rights.

Yes, I did install Gentoo. Twice. I deleted it both times after figuring out that it would take another 5 hours to recompile gnome/mozilla/konqueror/insert-app-name-here because the package was some buggy pre-release alpha version.

Finally, they can't even get portage right -- it is one of the most unintuitive systems ever created. Why not make it more interactive and customizable? It's about as painful to change the options for building an app as it is with a source RPM. Unless you invest hours in reading crappy documentation and hacking portage scripts, you get all the disadvantages of using RPMs (lack of configurability) combined with the disadvantages of compiling from source (time waste).

What the hell is wrong with just using a normal distribution like Mandrake or Debian, people? Does gedit really need all the optimization it can get from compiling it for a P4 with SSE2 extensions enabled? What if you decide to upgrade to an Athlon?

Its funny just looking at it _________________95% of all computer errors occur between chair and keyboard (TM)

I have never tried archLinux, but having spend a long time listening to it's developers and what few users I know of bash Gentoo endlessly I think it's not the distro for me - it doesn't seem to innovate, instead time is spend in flamewars...

If you can't stand people dissing your linux distro, I'd hate to see how pissed off you get if someone dissed your family.

Lighten up Guys - There are people out there that haven't seen the light and most probably never will. Gentoo is good, but it does have some problems (most of which are being fixed) and not everyone wants to compile everything as there are people out there who don't build their own computer.

The slashdot article was responsible for a painful experience of hot coffee coming out my nose (don't try this at home kids). It's not completely true, but it's damm close in some points. Not so much about gentoo, but the people who "preach" about it._________________Since it is the optimal DVD-RAM correspondence for backup of personal computer data, and lighting soft needlessness, it is data preservation by floppy disk feeling.

Gentoo has the best package management system amongst all the Linux distros, period. Agreed, it's drawback is its long compilation hours. But that's kinda like a Gents hobby. I'd rather compile packages from source optimized for my CPU architecture, than install pre-compiled binaries, compiled on a MAC for all I know. *shivers as he reminisces his Windows days...*

Although, many may disagree, I still think there are latent benefits to compiling from source than from pre-compiled binaries. I'm just not enlightened enough to list constructive reasons or points.

Here's the retort I wrote up, we should make it really good and then post it back next time that fool posts his on Slashdot again. Yeah I know I was bored at work...

Quote:

Official Anonymous Coward Gentoo Slashdot Troll translator-o-matic

Let's look at the language of a Slashdot Troll who posts anomyously because he's a coward and doesn't want to be flamed. He uses Red Hat and thinks it is the best thing that was ever invented. He doesn't realize that Gentoo users have respect for other distros and support the idea of choice.

"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."
I have never used Gentoo because I lack the skills to build a Linux system. I am ignorant of the fact that no package takes five days to compile, and that the standard optimization settings are not unstable. It is scary for me to use something that is not compiled for a 386. I also didn't realize that you can do more than one thing at a time on Linux. Multitasking? Is that when more than one app shows up in my task bar?

"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom."
I've never watched a program compile because I love RPMs. I don't understand that some people like to have the latest versions of packages instead of waiting for a .deb or .rpm release. It hurts my feelings that other people know more about programming than I do so I made up this argument. I am only using Linux because it's free and I don't care for the spirit of open source and free choice, which is why I feel I must put people down for choosing a different distribution than the one I use.

"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."
I am ignorant of the fact that apt-get, another very popular and powerful package manager, is also very similar to Ports. It was actually me who the text-based installer scared off, and that is why I don't want to try Gentoo. My real issue here is my insecurity, and my defense mechanism is making fun of how long it takes to compile programs from source.

"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and .debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages), my box MUST be faster. It's nothing to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."
I've never used Gentoo so that's why I don't know that large programs like GNOME, KDE, and OpenOffice load much faster. After being loaded, they are also much more responsive. I should really read the forums where countless ex-Red Hat users talk about how much faster things load in Gentoo. As if that wasn't enough, I am also ignorant of the fact that I can use BOTH apt-get AND rpm package managers inside Gentoo if I am so inclined.

"...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..."
Again, I've never used Gentoo and I love my distro so this was funny to me. It's actually me who uses an overclocked machine because I find that programs in Red Hat are far too unresponsive. It helps things go a little more smoothly to make my clock faster because I am not taking advantage of the special instructions my awesome brand new CPU can support. I hate people that have taken the time to optimize a system for their processor because I like point-and-click. So again, I will make fun of how long it takes to compile things. Five days, hahaha! Shoot, I better get out of the lab and get to third period before I'm tardy!

"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH .rpms together on the command line, and that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't designed for)."
I'm too stupid to realize that Gentoo can use RPMs just like other distributions. I don't want to try a new package manager because I'm lazy and stupid. I don't want other people to try it because then they will have more knowledge than me. People should not have a choice in what software they run, and compiling takes a long time! Hahahaha! I crack myself up.

"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -O9 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."
I will be using KDE 2.2 until 2010 because I know it is stable. The extensive testing that goes into it assures me that it will never crash. I don't know what -O9 means because I've never read the GCC man page and -fomit-instructions sounds pretty funny! I didn't realize that you can use packages that aren't bleeding-edge in Gentoo. It also slipped my mind that anyone running a production server wouldn't install bloated GUIs anyways. I love the way Red Hat makes up their own version numbers for packages because it makes me feel special. I have no idea what the real version of the software I'm running is and since I don't care about things like security it doesn't matter to me.

"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"
It angers me that a bunch of freelance hackers can put together such a good distribution. I love to pay Red Hat their support charge to get my updates delievered straight to my Bluecurve GUI. I heard that Window Server 2003 was going to have a command-line interface, so I'm going to save my money for Longhorn. I didn't realize that many productive companies are already starting to use Gentoo because it's easy to install, it isn't bloated with applications not needed, uses less memory, and can actually be installed FASTER than Red Hat if I choose to use the GRP or a stage 3 install. I think it is far more economical to pay Red Hat for support and copies of their free software because, well, my company does it with Windows and that's working out great!

"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."
I have never used Gentoo because I lack the skills to build a Linux system. I am ignorant of the fact that no package takes five days to compile, and that the standard optimization settings are not unstable. It is scary for me to use something that is not compiled for a 386. I also didn't realize that you can do more than one thing at a time on Linux. Multitasking? Is that when more than one app shows up in my task bar?

Uhm... just to be strict a package might take 5 days to compile (and maybe more, think about OO.org on an awfully low-end box).

Also using the machine during compile is good but, depending on how much processor you need and how you niced the processes involved, the compile might take ages to finish (but then this is your problem).

In the end I'd put something like "I am ignorant that CPU unused is wasted and I can't organize my time to let my machine compile when I don't need much CPU because i.e. I'm sleeping or I'm away."

But even better:

Dante Alighieri wrote:

Let us not speak of them; but look, and pass on.

_________________I may not agree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.

A machine that takes 5 days to compile OpenOffice might not be a good idea to even install X on, it might be a tad to slow for most peoples likings - the answer should be:

"I'm afraid to upgrade my trust old 75MHz Pentium, and it will take me ages to compile anything under any circumstances.. I'm holding out for 128-Bit CPUs, my techie buddy tells me they are "just around the corner".. he's 1337 because he reads /."

i really fscking hate /. if they dont like gentoo then go away simple. i dont like redhat but you dont hear me ranting on endlessy about it. why? because ive better things to do lol.
lets be honest here gentoo was created for g33ks for g33ks. its a g33ky distro it will always be *i hope* if you dont want that then use suse or libernet*sp* there both good and they are both taking linux in a different direction to gentoo. i thought the point of gentoo was choice?
i just got pist at /. not so long ago just the endless trolling about nothing. i swear to god theres these sad little nerds sitting there going on about how bad gentoo or this or that. they need to get out and get laid. i remember someone telling me slackware is great because all the people at ./ use it. so isn't that a lame reason for using it?_________________Some people go to counselling,
others use linux

I use so many distros I guess I just wonder why linux users try to attack one another all the time, normally with little experience with the topic at hand and no decent reasons. I really wasn't meaning to rave so much, I just don't understand why we can't transition as a group to be cohesive and say "gentoo is different because it uses ports and is easy to upgrade" and "slack is different as it uses no built in dependency checker (unless ldd counts) so you have to know every package installed" (although we have the -p option of course).

I really hope from here on out most people in the forms can change their wording to show how cohesive we are. Embrace differences, but just call them what they are, differences. I am tired of the mine is bigger than yours attitude. And, no offense to others here, I am tired of the "not for newbs" crap I see. Linux like everything else, takes work. Lets make life easier and where it isn't show people how to learn. If they don't want to, then send them to mandrake.

mrjohnston_________________I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my granfather did, unlike all the passengers in his car.

Last edited by mrjohnston on Fri Jun 06, 2003 4:32 pm; edited 1 time in total

I saw the same post on slashdot a few days ago as well, and i nearly fell off my chair laughing. I like gentoo for things that appeal to me, those things might not be as important to some others, who will look for other things.
It's a bit cryptic, but it boils down to simple truth; you choose what's right for YOU. The whole distro war stuff is ridiculous, but at least there are different distro's and different systems to choose from. In the end it's all Linux right?

Give a man a distro, keep him interested for a day...
Show him how it works, keep him interested for a lifetime.

That's what I like about Gentoo.

Build a man a fire - Warm him for one day.
Set a man on fire - Warm him for the rest of his life _________________Since it is the optimal DVD-RAM correspondence for backup of personal computer data, and lighting soft needlessness, it is data preservation by floppy disk feeling.

It annoys me when I see people bash Gentoo for not being what they think it should be.

For example:

"Gentoo takes days to install anything"
Gentoo wasn't designed to be a quick easy setup distro that allowes me to do everything within 30 mins of putting the CD in. Its the same as complaining about a fork not being able to hold liquids like a spoon.

"Gentoo days 5 days to install openoffice"
Well then I'm afraid your a fool for thinking a massive app like openoffice, wirtten in C++ with compiler optimizations applied will compile in under 10 mins._________________a.k.a port001
Found a bug? Please report it: Gentoo Bugzilla